


Hell When We Get There

by Kyrillion



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23631958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyrillion/pseuds/Kyrillion
Summary: “Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice... You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.”(The Amber Spyglass)"I have a horrible feeling that I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist."(Fleabag)
Kudos: 8





	Hell When We Get There

She met the love of her life when she was nineteen and sparkling with the freshly cast glory of having gone up to Cambridge. It might just have been one of those passions of youth when everything is the Greatest Romance of Our Ages, but they were young and clever and pleased with themselves and delighted with each other and would find ways verging on the reckless to trip each other up in formal settings for the joke of it. They liked to go to the smartest tearoom in town and wind each other into hysterics. Laughing like hell, vulgar and free as children - only to exercise their ability to charm the disapproval out of the other patrons. Maybe Marisa loved a girl, or maybe it was a scholarship student whose father was only a grocer, but one way or another it was never going to be allowed to become marriage. But that was all right, marriages were a political game anyway, and they were both ambitious.

And then the person got sick and stupidly, it was only influenza, died.

Charm grew up around the numbness like a pearl. She went to a great many parties and talked to a great many people. Hopeless at pretending equal earnestness at the men who tried to have earnest conversations, a sardonic twitch always threatening to tug her mouth into a helpless grin. She’d long since found out that being funny wasn’t much of a tool but finding other people funny, men funny, could be powerful. And the wonderful thing was she did find them funny. Utterly absurd.

She fell out of the habit of talking to her daemon. He just didn’t seem very interested. And she married the powerful and rich and humourless Edward Coulter who was one of those men quite prepared to believe all women are mercurial enigmas and was pleased to find someone so free of moody depths.

She hadn’t felt a single thing in the three years since going down from Gyrton when she met Asriel and then she did feel: she hated him.

The pregnancy was easy. Something else had been moving her in her affair with Asriel. She didn’t know what (but the night Lyra was conceived she had gone to the bathroom after and seen in the mirror her face was wet with tears). But this she was in control of. Either the child could pass for Coulter’s or it would not, in which case she made leisurely, exacting plans for a feigned miscarriage. It was an intellectual exercise really; she didn’t image her husband would enquire beyond the distasteful report of a stillbirth.

Time for another Great Loss. She had expected a few tears from herself again at parting with the child, but found it was easier even than that. A peaceful airiness like the blue calm of the Virgin Mother, too wise to let maternal feeling come between her child and the Right Thing.

Only someone – and it bothered her immensely, more than anything else in the whole affair, that she never did find out who – told Edward Coulter the truth, and then he surprised her by being really quite murderously angry about it.

Marisa prodded at the thought of his rushing to Oxfordshire to find and kill her little baby in its hiding place and felt a pang, and behind it a buzz almost like excitement, and felt bad about it, and pleased that she had the grace to feel bad.

And then it all worked out. Edward was killed. Asriel who she had rather worried – not hoped, no, worried was the word – might propose some kind of absurd domestic arrangement never appeared and by and by she heard he was terribly cross with her, and she felt her old uncontrollable grin twitching the corners of her mouth at how seriously men took themselves. So the baby lived and she didn’t have to feel terrible or wonder why she didn’t feel terrible, and she never had to have anything more to do with her, never could have anything more to do with her, which was fine.

She congratulated herself on not being sway to distracting emotions, and poured a buzzing energy she didn’t know the origin of into laughing and smiling her big tomboyish smile at life, at the men of the Magisterium. They kept being so good to her, after all. She was their favourite kind of woman. Transparent, ambitious and ruthless and un-pious. Slightly vulgar, really, but all the better to control her when needed. Except they kept finding, one after another, that by the time they decided that the Coulter woman needed to be given a sharp, kindly lesson in propriety, she was somehow unaccountably beyond them.

Her daemon had stopped responding to her remarks altogether by now. And then when that baby in Oxfordshire must be what, 11 years, 8 months and 17 days old now, Marisa found herself – quite unplanned, of course – in a position that it occurred to her that she could take that child, what fool name had they given her _Lyra Lyra Lyra_ that she wasn’t even allowed to hold and wouldn’t that show them how powerful she was? Show herself – no _them_ that no one could touch her and take what she lov - what she chosen to have?

Why she could tell the child she was her mother if she fancied – but no, when she thought that the suffocating sense of a needing, sucking little beast came to her – no, better to be a sister, an aunt, a kindly employer. She could love like that, without confusing the child with needing to love back. She could mould her and make her. She would send her to her own college, Gyrton, a very good place, where Marisa had once lov –

And one day wold visit to take tea with her at that smart little place she used to with –

(It was very odd, her brain kept getting distracted by irrelevant thoughts, and every time it happened her daemon would give her a look like he’d been startled by static electricity)

One day, she could say to Lyra, "Darling I’m afraid I have a confession to make and you’re going to hate me terribly. It’s all about where you really come from, you see." And Lyra – was her hair blonde or more brown? Impossible to be sure from the sepia photographs she had procured, it was an irritating gap in the daydream – would cast her own can’t-stay-serious look back at her and say, "Oh - yes? What could that possibly be - mama?".

She was looking forward to how much they were going to laugh together, like hell.

**Author's Note:**

> I read that Phoebe Waller-Bridge was as obsessed as a teenager as I was with His Dark Materials, and one I started imagining her playing Mrs. Coulter I couldn't stop.
> 
> I thought about how someone like Fleabag - clever and funny and vulnerable - might be shaped by a world like the one in which she grew up, how she might become someone like Mrs. Coulter.
> 
> (I haven't yet read The Secret Commonwealth which I'm saving in case the lockdown days get really hard to bear. So if this contradicts anything in that book, that's why!)


End file.
